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Parashat Chukkat -- Is Judaism More Red Heifer or #SelfCare?

This was my D'var Torah for Saturday, June 19, 2021, Parashat Chukkat. The article I reference at the start is really good, in ways that somewhat connect to my theme and also jump off in another important direction.

I was in the middle of thinking about the parah adumah -- the red heifer with its potpouri of potion parts that would be very at home in a Harry Potter book -- when I came across an e-mail from The Forward titled, “Has Shabbat become just another form of #self-care?” In one corner is the idea that Jewish practices are good for us in a self-care sense, on secular terms -- we need rest, we need to unplug, we need not to let seven days go by without calming and resetting. In the opposite corner is the red heifer, the most inscrutable practice in all of Torah.

In Midrash B’midbar Rabbah, we learn that a Roman pagan asked Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai specifically about the parah adumah: "These rituals you do, they seem like witchcraft! You bring a heifer, burn it, crush it up, and take its ashes. If one of you is impure by the dead, two or three drops are sprinkled on him, and you declare him pure?!" Rabban Yochanan said to the pagan, "Has a restless spirit ever entered you?" He said to him, "No!" "Have you ever seen a man where a restless spirit entered him?" He said to him, "Yes!" ..."And what did you do for him?" He said to him, "We brought roots and made them smoke beneath him, and poured water and the spirit fled." Rabban Yochanan said to him, "Your ears should hear what leaves from your mouth! The same thing is true for this spirit, the spirit of impurity...They sprinkle upon him purifying waters, and the spirit of impurity flees." After he left the rabbi's students said, "You got rid of him with a skimpy response, a thin reed. What will you say to us?" Rabban Yochanan said to them, "By your lives, a dead person doesn't make things impure, and the water doesn't make things pure. Rather, God said, 'I have engraved a rule, a chok -- I have decreed a decree and you have no permission to transgress what I decreed, as the parasha begins: ‘This is a chok [rule] of the Torah.’

To the Roman pagan, Rabban Yochanan says: You and I know that certain things work, and maybe what Jews are doing seems like magic to you but we’ve all got a common language of self-help. The red heifer is a kind of medicine; it makes us better. But to his own students, he says: There’s no explanation in this case, but we have to do it anyway. It is one of the chukkim, one of the inscrutable laws that are mitzvot just because the Divine has commanded, no other reason.

I do not think that Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai believed that everything in Torah is like the red heifer, the parah adumah. Not everything is one of the chukkim, the impenetrable laws. But I admit I like his answer to the Roman. Not the outdated medicine part, but the idea that there’s a function to the practice that we could figure out, and it’s good for a person. In fact, in spite of what Rabban Yochanan says to his own students, Jewish tradition does try to interpret the elements of parah adumah potion -- the cedar, the hyssop, the scarlet -- to try to find a purpose for each element. Something for us to meditate on that will help us heal our souls or something that symbolizes how to become better people. 

But at the same time, we have this phrase that is familiar from many prayers and the Torah -- chukkim u’mishpatim. In Jewish thought, chukkim are those practices that are or seem beyond our comprehension, while mishpatim are practices or rules that are socially valuable or valuable to our personal lives. Chukkim come first in this phrase -- the irrational laws before the functional ones. Some would say it's the chukkim that define religion as religion.

But trying to make most things in Judaism like the red heifer, something we do to prove that we can serve something other than ourselves -- that can lead in absurd directions and dangerous directions too. We here wouldn’t buy that. The Torah itself says later that other peoples look at Israel and our ways and say that only a wise and understanding nation could live in such a way. Wisdom, meaning wisdom to apply to life -- not just awe and obedience.

So, some Jewish philosophers have suggested that the Torah of revelation is a short-cut, because most of us don’t have the time or energy or wisdom to figure out for ourselves what is good for us.

And yet -- the problem with Shabbat as #self-care is that if we can explain Jewish practices always in terms of a purpose, is that really Judaism? Isn't that just looking back at ourselves? Surely we could design from scratch a weekly rest and even some rituals that give us rest, build community, and even move us toward kindness and justice that are more direct and easier, without the mumbo-jumbo and the details we don't get.

So where does that leave us, as far as chukkum u'mishpatim? Can we have both the red heifer and #Shabbat-as-self-care?

A big part of me thinks that if Judaism can be taught in terms of self-care -- dayenu. We certainly don’t suffer from a lack of self-care and grounding in our lives and this current world. If Judaism can be a vehicle for that, even if it’s for reasons that aren’t completely coherent intellectually, that’s not bad at all.

But my real answer comes sort of from the red heifer. It comes from magic -- specifically, the magic of Harry Potter world.

To me the genius of Harry Potter is not that it takes place in an alternative universe, although it’s true that Muggles can’t go to Hogwarts. To me, the big khap is that the magical world is layered on top of our world. If you are fortunate enough to have inherited the capacity for magic, you can see things others in London don’t see, and you have special powers too.

And my favorite locale in the universe of Harry Potter is Platform 9 3/4 at King’s Cross Station. To get from the regular city onto the train to Hogwarts, you have to run into a brick pillar. It really is a brick wall, and you run at it and into it. It looks impenetrable -- like trying to understand the red heifer. But your propensity for magic, even before you are well-trained in it, allows you to get through it, to the train that will take you to the special school, where you learn where you fit into the magic world layered on top of the world most people see. Where you struggle with how to make the potions that work and rescue, and you complain about the teachers, and you wonder whether it all makes sense.

Judaism, all its practices and rhythms and even the ethics that you could pick up elsewhere, are a magical world layered onto our world. To get there does require flinging yourself at brick walls -- red heifers,  practices that aren’t obvious, Hebrew words, sometimes Aramaic -- but when we do go at them full speed, we see that we are connected to a bigger story. Our daily lives, our friendships, our rivalries even, our powers are all connected to a bigger story -- the Torah story, the Exodus, the story of redeeming and completing this world. Every Shabbat is part of that story, every word of our Siddur is, every specific ritual is. They don’t all make sense one by one; yet each is a piece that whole tapestry.

Being part of that story involves taking care of ourselves. Because being the person or the people who deserve care and rest and joy is itself one of the main points of the story and of Jewish history. Because Shabbat rest and ritual celebration are what allow us to glimpse where the story is heading. Our individual acts and each piece of the Torah, even the strange parts, are part of a much larger book we are playing a part in.

So whether it’s the parah adumah, the red heifer, or Kashrut or Shabbat or the Hebrew language, fling yourself at the brick walls of Judaism. Believe that the grape juice at kiddush is a magic potion, more than just the sugary chemicals in it, and enjoy the sweetness too. Keep flinging yourself, and don’t settle for easy but incomplete explanations on this side of the wall. It’s not bruises or intellectual brick walls ahead, but a deep care for you, and special powers for you and us together. It’s not just sensible; it’s magic.

 

Clubhouse Experiment Friday 4/2 at 1:00 pm -- Help Me Finish My D'var Torah!

I'm going to dip my toes into Clubhouse this week, and talk with anyone who shows up about the D'var Torah I promised to complete when I spoke last week. If you're on Clubhouse find my room "Help Me Write My Shabbat Sermon!" Friday at 1pm eastern time. Or feel free to read this and add your comments here.

I want to continue to delve into this passage from the Haggadah:

אָמַר רַבִּי אֶלְעָזָר בֶּן־עֲזַרְיָה הֲרֵי אֲנִי כְּבֶן שִׁבְעִים שָׁנָה וְלֹא זָכִיתִי שֶׁתֵּאָמֵר יְצִיאַת מִצְרַיִם בַּלֵּילוֹת עַד שֶׁדְּרָשָׁהּ בֶּן זוֹמָא, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר, לְמַעַן תִּזְכֹּר אֶת יוֹם צֵאתְךָ מֵאֶרֶץ מִצְרַיִם כֹּל יְמֵי חַיֶּיךָ. יְמֵי חַיֶּיךָ הַיָּמִים. כֹּל יְמֵי חַיֶּיךָ הַלֵּילוֹת. וַחֲכָמִים אוֹמְרִים יְמֵי חַיֶּיךָ הָעוֹלָם הַזֶּה. כֹּל יְמֵי חַיֶּיךָ לְהָבִיא לִימוֹת הַמָּשִׁיחַ:

Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah said:
Look, I am something like 70 years old -- or, I am as though 70 years old
And I didn't merit to understand -- or, I didn't merit to persuade others that the law should be
That the Exodus from Egypt should be said at night, until Ben Zoma derived it from this verse:
"In order that you shall remember the day of your leaving the land of Egypt all the days of your life"
(Deuteronomy 16:3)
"The days of your life" means the days; "All the days of your life" adds the nights.
And the Sages [as a group] say:
"The days of your life" means this world; "All the days of your life" means to bring/to include the days of the Messiah.

So, who was Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah in his time, and how old was he really, and what is the difference between seeing the Exodus as a daytime or a nighttime story or memory.... These are literary and philosophical but also very political questions too. Thoughts?

Pesach Community Message 5781

This is the note I sent out to our congregation on Friday, March 26, 2021 as we get ready for Pesach to begin.

Dear Friends:
 
I have a short Pesach agenda to share with you below, but first: I realized a couple days ago how much I want Pesach this year to be like Chanukkah.

There's no way, at least for me, that everything meaningful is going to happen in the few hours of the two Seders. Chanukkah is something we anticipate, we prepare for, and it's not over all at once. We come back for something each day; we do something each day.

Actually that's been a theme of the Jewish year of 5781. I wanted to teach you to think not about just Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but about the season of Elul and Tishrei. I put out a dozen daily teachings before and after Purim last month.

Truth be told, I've been having trouble planning my Seders this year. This year there's so much to reflect on through the lens of the Exodus story and rituals. So much to teach the next generation. And that's compounded by the disappointment of not being able to have Seders the way I love to yet again, and the complexity of orchestrating the usual conversation around my Seder tables at home and at the synagogue.

What unlocked me, finally, is realizing that Pesach is not just a day or two. The Seders can plant some spiritual spring seeds for each of us to tend and nurture during the whole week of Pesach. Here are my suggestions for the coming week:

1. Whatever you do for Seder this year is what you are supposed to be doing.

Whether you're Zooming, or gathering with a small group safely, or having a quiet meal and reading something meaningful to yourself, it will be special because you're able to do it.

If you'd like some help, our Pesach page is full of resources that literally lead you through a Seder, by audio or video, whether it's for half an hour or a couple of hours.

2. However you mark the Seder, keep in mind the people who are having Seders differently.
 
In Egypt on the night of the very first Pesach, people were separated into households or maybe ate with one other family. But they knew they were part of a whole nation doing that, and that they would see everyone else in the morning in a great march.

We are a community, and each of us is somewhere different on the long path to physical togetherness. Have other people and groups of us in your awareness, however you yourself are doing the Seder. We will one day march together, hopefully soon.
 
3. Learn and think this week about some nuance in the original story of the Exodus.

If you haven't done this in a while, take some time during the weekend or the week to read chapters 1-4 and 12 in the book of Exodus, the most important book in history. You will for sure find something that startles you -- about a character, a twist in the narrative, a motivation. You'll wonder why something is told in just this way. So much about our world and our own souls today is revealed in the wording on these verses.

4. Reflect on life during the pandemic in light of the metaphors and symbols of Pesach.

Remember when leavened products were hard to come by a year ago -- flour, pasta, bread? Each of the symbols of the Seder plate and many aspects of the Exodus narrative are a prompt to bore into some aspect of the pandemic experience. All you have to do is pick one of them and ask: how does this relate? How does this help me clarify something important in my life or my ethical philosophy?

5. Think about Exodus and something happening in the world now.

It’s been a remarkable year since last Pesach in terms of our awareness of issues of justice, oppression, freedom, and suffering. Who in the wider nation and world is profoundly in Egypt? Who in the world is most profoundly a Miryam or a Moshe right now?

* * * * *
Pesach is a great gift to us, and through us to our community and the world. The Seder nights whets our appetite with the Exodus story, and the week keeps us chewing on it.

Wishing you a zissen Pesach, a sweet Passover festival,
Rabbi Jon

Figuring Out the Talmud's Last Page on Pesach

Here is a Passover puzzle I was trying to solve today at our siyyum (completion of a section of Torah study) to undo the fast of the first-born (that’s a whole other story). It is the last teaching of Massechet Pesachim, the Talmudic book about Passover.

 

Rav Simlai attended a pidyon ha-ben, the ceremony for “redeeming” a 30-day-old first-born baby boy from a kohen (priest). Background: First-born Jewish boys are considered to have a special obligation to the Divine, because their lives were in danger on the night of the first Passover, the prelude to the escape from Egypt, when the tenth plague struck and killed all Egyptian first-born. Their survival having been a special gift and mystery, they are presumed to belong to the Divine, and the priests are entitled to draft them into religious service in the Temple. The Torah says that in practice, members of the tribe of Levi are substituted for the first-born, but as part of this the father of each first-born has to redeem the baby from the Levite priests. We actually still have this custom, of paying a few symbolic coins to a kohen in a special ritual, even though there is no Temple where the boy would grow up to serve.

 

So back to Rav Simlai, who is a guest at a pidyon ha-ben, and the other guests recognize that there’s a rabbi in the house so he is asked a question. There are two blessings recited at the ceremony. One goes with fulfilling the mitzvah, the obligation, and is said by the father. The other is the She-he-chayanu, a blessing of gratitude to the Divine for “giving us life, keeping us alive, and bringing us to this day.” Rav Simlai is asked who should say this – the father because he’s doing a mitzvah, or the kohen because he’s getting some money in his pocket for probably not a hard day’s work (that part is my editorializing).

 

Well Rav Simlai didn’t have a ready answer, and like I imagine many a rabbi at a party, didn’t have all his books with him, not realizing he’d be on the clock. So he excused himself (or maybe he waited until the party was over) and headed over the House of Study, where he got an answer: The father says the blessing. The Talmud concludes that such is the law – and that’s it, the end of Tractate Pesachim.

 

So I wonder why this is the last word about Passover and what it means. Well one easy equation is that redeeming each child is a microcosm of the redemption of all Israel. Just as the father buys back the child’s freedom, so too God bought us back into freedom. God had told Moses, after all, to tell Pharaoh that “Israel is My first-born son.” So this father, as he starts his family, is being reminded not to take his son’s freedom for granted, nor really his life, because after all the first-born experienced even more danger the night of the first Passover than everyone else. This is a way to bring the idea that each of us left Egypt to a very personal level; it’s not just history and it’s also not just political and social in scale.

 

The only problem with that is: If father=God and child=Israelites, who does the priest stand for? Surely the priest is not like Pharaoh! Surely if the boy were to be unredeemed and left at the service of the kohen, this would a life completely unlike slavery to Pharaoh.

 

Best I can do is this: In Egypt, the choice was stark between slavery and freedom. For this father, there is a true choice between two destinies of service: one in direct official service to God, and one is some other holy way that this father and family will have responsibility to work out. That’s what freedom means. It’s more than an alternative to the horror of slavery. It’s the opportunity and responsibility to provide multiple paths of goodness and holiness for our children, to see in our own lives that there are multiple paths. If a path that comes with some label of goodness – “follow this arrow toward the priest who will guide you to a life of service” – if that isn’t your path, it’s not enough to say I can’t do that, I can’t be that. The duty of the parent, and of the generation more generally who welcomes any child into the world, is to help them look over the other paths, the ones that aren’t so obviously labeled as “service.”

 

So indeed, the father says the blessing of She-hechaynau, thank you for bringing us to this point, where it’s my responsibility to help this child learn how to choose freely among the many good choices, to find the path that’s right. I gladly pay a few coins for that privilege, for having the power of creating freedom for this child, the way the Divine did and does for all of us.

 

A zissen Pesach – a sweet Passover to all who are celebrating!

A Year in the Desert -- Reflections One Year Later

This was my D'var Torah on Saturday, March 13, 2021. Shabbat Ha-Chodesh is the name for the Shabbat that precedes the start of the month when Pesach occurs. These are some of my reflections on the past year of the Covid-19 pandemic; one piece can hardly say it all.

Shabbat Ha-Chodesh, this day in the Jewish calendar, is a set of bookends for both a year in the Torah narrative, and a year in our lives. The parasha (Torah reading) concludes with the final touches on the setup of the temporary, portable Sanctuary -- exactly one year to the day from when Moshe and Aharon were given the instructions for the night they would all leave Egypt. And it was this same Shabbat Hachodesh one year ago that was our first Zoom Shabbat service, with almost all the congregation at home and a minyan of us here celebrating Madeline Lee’s Bat Mitzvah. We have been once through the Torah since our last regular Shabbat service. 

What a year was that first year in the Torah – begun in slavery; between the plagues, of darkness and death; then the hurried preparations for the first days of a new life; crossing that Sea; a whole lot of new teachings to take in. Failing at first, badly, with the Golden Calf. Then building the mishkan, the spiritual center, out of everything valuable the people had -- everything valuable they might not even have realized they had -- putting something holy in the center of their camp amidst all the fear and emptiness of the midbar, the desert. 

What a year has been this past year of Covid-19. 

This morning I want to look back a bit, and next Shabbat to look ahead a bit. I’ll talk from the point of view of us as a whole, but this year hasn’t been the same for each of us and one person can’t presume to tell the story of everyone. People in our community have died of Covid-19, have been sick, have lost family members – at least a tenth of the households in our membership have had someone in their family who has died or been sick, and many more of us have lost friends to the disease. I haven’t asked everyone if they want their loved ones’ names said out loud, but I can say that the first person in our congregation who died from Covid-19 was Joshua Stern, Diana and David’s son, Jessica’s brother, who died during Pesach last year. For many months, the only times that members of the shul would actually see each other officially was at funerals. 

Another tenth at least of our congregation has at one point of another lost jobs or hours or income this year because of the pandemic, or had retirement or transition plans disrupted. And I don’t know how to describe the strain and pain this year has contained for so many people who live on their own, as one or two people; who have been confined in elder living communities or long-term care; who are children, and parents of children at home, and parents and grandparents and others separated from their families; who had already been dealing with other physical and emotional challenges and illnesses and family challenges, that are difficult in regular times and even more disrupted this past year. 

We have built this past year a mishkan, many mishkenot, a set of holy places and practices, out of our own materials. We have discovered together what it is that we had on hand to build with, what we brought with us hastily into this year.  

Most of all we have had mitzvahs. I make a point of noting, most Shabbatot at the start of services, the line we sing as we start, v’ahavta l’rayacha kamocha – all the ways we have adapted to gathering and staying apart in repeated fulfillment of the mitzvah of “loving our neighbor as ourselves”. I say it out loud to remind us that in these hours on Saturday morning we are holding each other’s lives in our hands; we are holding the lives of the people who live around us, who we don’t know, as our own responsibility. And not just in services but throughout the days of our weeks. 

Time has been so amorphous, and a lot of us have been trying recall exactly what the first days of these twelve months were like. For me, it revolved around Purim. On Monday morning, March 9 of last year, I went to Shirley’s apartment at Langdon Place and we recorded our second annual Esther rap. That night we gathered here, in smaller numbers than usual for the Megillah reading. I think we had food even -- we were trying at that time to have one person serve so we wouldn’t all be handling the same serving utensils -- and I remember wondering even then if the Megillah gathering was the right thing to do.  

For most of the next few days, our team recreated the upcoming Purim carnival at least once a day. Let’s cancel the Kitah Zayin (7th Grade) pie- throwing booth, and let's also wipe down each ball and fishing stick between participants. No let’s use only disposable balls and sticks, and we’ll just hand out prizes for tickets and not let kids rummage through them. No, let’s not have any of the booths but we’ll just gather in a circle for some songs and have a costume parade. 

No, we can’t do it at all. Probably fifteen hours of work just to decide to do nothing.  

Let’s bring everyone mishloach manot (Purim baskets), very carefully -- and here, driver, are plastic gloves for you to wear and please put each box in a bag, contact-free, and say hello in person to everyone who answers their door and make sure to stand far enough away, and promise that we’ll see each other soon.  

Everything was like that at the start – every decision not to do something took hours, before we even got to figuring out how to do the all-new things or the necessary regular things like shopping for food in a new way. 

The day after we delivered mishloach manot in person and said L’hit’raot (“until we see each other”), we sent out a note to whole congregation that we would for the time being gather only online, starting that night, Monday, March 16. I took a bunch of screenshots of that minyan. 24 screens and regular phones all together, most of us named but some identified still by number or e-mail; we were still figuring out Zoom.  I must have asked everyone to smile, because in one photo Stan is smiling and Larry is smiling, and Richard and Carol are smiling on different screens in the same home,, and Carlos and Joy and Jessica and Jerry and Laura and Gordon and Nancy and Elliot and Daniel are smiling. And Ira I think is smiling but you can’t really see in the dark of his room. Very quickly we added minyanim for Saturday and Sunday nights, and there hasn’t been a single day we haven’t had a minyan of ten. That Thursday was our first online Religious School class; our triumph was getting Rina Scharf online. 

At our best we have been full of mitzvot. We’ve been building a capacity to check in with people by phone; we’ve connected people to resources and support, in personal conversations and what we can put up online. On the fly, we’ve had to figure out how to safely do bikkur cholim, to visit people who have been sick, and dying; how to gather safely for burial; how to comfort people during shiva. Without hugs and with masks; with iPhones streaming and Zooms instead of living rooms. All the extra burdens on those in mourning to stare into that screen at everyone all at once, rather than having people come up to you one by one. I worry about the pent-up and incomplete grief of our mourners. 

I am so proud to be connected to the caregivers -- nurses and doctors and elder care and home care workers -- who from the start went into dangers known and unknown, and many of whom volunteer now on their off hours to give vaccines. I am so proud to see in the news and at local meetings members of this congregation who work in public health, in professional roles and on governing boards. I am so grateful to the teachers, and everyone who has had to or who has chosen to go to work in places with known or unknown risks.  

In the daily life of Beth Abraham for a year, we have had online gatherings every day and often more than once a day. I believe we have saved at least one life through these gatherings, and we have made other lives more bearable.  

So many of our members early on became mask makers. Some sewing by hand, some working for hours after their regular jobs, some converting their slowed-down businesses into mask manufacture, some joining up with calls to action from individual leaders or town organizations. Making masks for frontline workers, who were so short of them at the start. Masks for anyone they worried about, particularly older people but even for my family, so people could go shopping safely. Many of you did that work, to help bridge the weeks it took for an entire industry to get up and running. 

At our best as a society scientists and technicians and engineers, and the companies and universities and labs that organize them, have been working nonstop on lifesaving discovery and creation and manufacture and distribution on a huge scale. At our best as a society, we reengineered a system for holding democratic elections, and cried out against continuing racial injustice even as we cried out about everything. At our best, our elected representatives to the Congress in a poisonous political environment worked several times to come to the aid of all of us in massive ways. 

Here in the wilderness of New Hampshire, our shul built its new mishkan out of everything we had. We have our Betzalels and their teams-- our tech designers and operators, our Zoom supervisors, our people who know their way around a soundboard and a camera and networking equipment. We have our Aharons and other equivalents to the Kohanim and Levi’im, who organize and lead our services so we could do far more than go through the motions. These things we do, to interact and hear each other and see each other, to create a live service from so many locations -- it’s amazing and I’m proud that we’re toward the forefront. We have our Miryams, who provide inspiration and joy, every week through singing and over coffee and yarn, and cooking and Torah and Hebrew language for adults and for children. 

We have been building a mishkan out of things we have. Our fabrics and threads and animals skins include our wires and plexiglass and donated monitors. And of course the money contributed toward this mishkan, the Temple itself. At a time of economic contraction, the synagogue has been stable and we just raised the most money from the Purim baskets we ever have. Incredibly, new people have joined the congregation since a year ago today. 

And if I might say something about the Moshe’s, the rabbis. Not just me, but the rabbis of congregations all over North America and the clergy of Greater Nashua who have drawn so close to each other. A year ago, I thought that innovators in American Jewish life were leaving synagogue jobs or never even thinking of coming to work in shuls, all of them off starting their own ventures to do Jewish learning or spirituality. It turns out there are at least a few hundred of us, talking the same language and inventing the same things in parallel, sending around the concept papers and how-to guides, asking each other over and over what do our congregants need, how can we do more than just hold the line. I have personally met at least a dozen amazing colleagues through this grassroots work, people who you’ll never read about in the Times of Israel or the Forward, amazing partners and teachers. All of us know it’s not about the techniques, it’s not about preserving the shuls and our jobs -- it’s about taking care of you. 

The pandemic has challenged the practice of Judaism and the reality of Jewish community. I haven’t been in a hospital or an assisted living place or a nursing home, or even inside a shiva home, in this past year. I made that decision with other clergy in town all at once. That was the hardest thing to decide a year ago, and holding back from you at hard times has been the most awful part of my year personally as a rabbi. 

We decided, consciously, to change the character of our relationship to computers in the shul on Shabbat. It is absolutely the right decision but it doesn’t work for everyone. Our second or third Shabbat morning on Zoom something was wrong with the setup or people didn’t have the right link, and as I led services by myself I was also checking e-mails and texts from people right here on the bimah. Now we’ll decide what it means to integrate technology into Shabbat the way a previous generation integrated the automobile. Most of all in services, we just miss each others’ voices and spiritual energy. 

I have joked occasionally that there is a warehouse somewhere full of all the gefilte fish and pastries that have not been eaten in our shul and other shuls for a year. There was an article a couple months ago in The Atlantic about the loss of Kiddush, the time after services. Actually the word “Kiddush” never appears in the article by Amanda Mull  about the loss in our lives of the people we don’t have a good name for -- the relationships of standing around together after services or sitting at a table, deciding to talk for a minute or five or for an hour just on the spot. The conversations that aren’t prearranged but just happen, the intergenerational moments, the moments that breathe with volume and quiet, with interruptions and not just turn-taking, where people sit down and get up in the middle and come back later. A community is supposed to be a place where connections and conversations don’t only take place when they are scheduled or work-oriented or agenda-driven. The loss of Kiddush is profound, the loss of Shabbat dinners and Shabbat lunches and holy days together too. 

As a symbol of some of these losses and challenges, I have stubbornly kept our Shabbat service different the past year in a few ways. I have held us back from some of the rituals of reading the Torah and Haftarah -- not only because you are not here and not only because it would not be safe yet to walk around with the Torah if you were. I've insisted on using the not-perfect aspects of Zoom. I’ve done this because our prayer experience itself needs to have some of the not-smoothness and the chaos of our lives, or it won’t be real. I know no one likes the moments when we try to be a minyan together singing or reciting something on Zoom. It doesn’t sound great, but the cacophany has to be here, in the mishkan, a brokenness we bring when we are before the Divine. 

What a year since Shabbat Ha-Chodesh twelve months ago. We have brought everything we have to create the mishkan that is our lives; we have been building it for a year and we are still in the desert. I am so grateful for this Shabbat community that has stayed together. I miss you and worry about you. I want to sing with you and just linger with you, with no hurry to get out. I am grateful that you have wanted something for yourself on Shabbat morning, and wanted to be with others when this is not easy. That you have wanted to hear Torah from me, that you have wanted Shabbat to be still somehow a time of joy and a time of mutual support.  

Let’s not forget of course that each of us has our own story of this year, and let’s not forget the losses that can never be recovered and especially the people who you have lost and we have lost together.  

It is a whole year, an important year we are concluding. We are still in the midbar, still on our way, and may the mishkenot, the spiritual centers of every sort we have built help guide us on our desert journeys ahead -- just like the daytime cloud and the nighttime fire that began on the first day of the first month of the second year, and guided the people on their journeys and never went out. Baruch she-hecheyanu v’kiynmanu v’higiuyanu lazman hazeh – how blessed we are to be alive, to be kept alive, to have arrived at this time. Chazak chazak v’nitchazek -- may we each find strength and continue to give our strength to each other.  

Purim Playlist!

I've had fun making these, and hopefully you'll enjoy learning a bit about Purim and the month of Adar, one short bit at a time. A couple more are coming in the next few days. "Hamentashen for thought"!

You can click on the video and watch it here, expand it, or click on the three horizontal lines toward the top that appear, which will reveal the whole playlist.

Jewish Sources on Electronics and Shabbat

Next week I'm teaching in our synagogue Ritual Committee about issues relating to the use of electronics on Shabbat, particularly in connection with conducting services. Since I'm gathering source material I thought I would post for everyone the raw material from the Conservative movement.

There are certain basic concepts of halacha (Jewish law) that are important backdrop:

• m'lacha -- usually understood as creative, durable labor forbidden on Shabbat by the Torah
• avot m'lacha -- overarcing categories of m'lacha, of which there are 39
• tol'dot m'lacha -- derivative types of m'lacha, subsets of analogies to the 39 avot m'lacha
• ha-koteiv -- the one who writes (one of the 39)
• mi-d'oraita/d'oraita -- a law derived directly from the Torah (oraita is Aramaic for Torah)
• mi'drabbanan/d'rabbanan -- a law enacted by the rabbis of the Mishnah, often to keep people away from violating a Torah law
• sh'vut -- activities other than m'lacha that detract from the restfulness of Shabbat
• uv'din d'chol -- actions/activities associated with weekday time
• p'sik reishei v'lo... -- "he cut off its head; wouldn't...." a (colorful) metaphor for the concept of "double effect", actions that are done with one intention but have a likely second result
• muk'tzeh -- set off or set aside; objects that one should not touch because their major use is for m'lacha
• sh'at had'chak -- a pressing time or emergency/exigent situation

Some sources: RabbI Nevins, Rabbi Heller, and Rabbi Reisner are the most contemporary papers in terms of the technology they reference, though some of the older analysis is applicable still.

• Rabbi Daniel Nevins, "The Use of Electrical and Electronic Devices on Shabbat." (2012). This is a long survey with a good table of contents about conceptual and then specific issues. Electronics specifically are discussed in the ha-koteiv section starting on p. 30.
• Rabbi Gordon Tucker, "The Use of a Remote Audio/Video Monitor on Shabbat and Yom Tov" (1989)
• Rabbis Elliot Dorff and Gordon Tucker, "On Recording Shabbat and Yom Tov Services" (1989)
• Rabbi Joshua Heller, "Streaming Services on Shabbat and Yom Tov" (2020)
• Rabbi Avram Israel Reisner, "Zoom is Not the Way: A Dissent to 'Streaming Services on Shabbat and Yom Tov'" (2020)

Though not on the specific issue of Shabbat, essential reading about what does or does not make an electronic minyan is Rabbi Avram Israel Reisner, "Wired to the Kadosh Barukh Hu: Minyan via Internet" (2001).

Torah for This Week's Reading

Here are a few of my pieces related to this week's reading in the Torah on the first days of the Exodus, escaping from Pharaoh and crossing the Sea and heading into the desert toward Mt. Sinai:

What Is a Miracle? (why miracles are not about natural/supernatural but the relation of real/ideal)

Why Exodus Is the Most Important Book of All Time

Hope (about finding Joseph's bones)

 

Remembering Debbie Friedman on Her 10th Yahrzeit

I gave this D'var Torah on Saturday morning, January 23, on the Shabbat before Debbie Friedman's 10th yahrzeit.

On a Sunday night in early January 25 years ago, Laurie and I were living in Queens and there was a big Nor’easter brewing. Some of you may remember, it came all the way up here – it shut down New York City for several days. We had tickets to a concert at Carnegie Hall and decided to go anyway. This was before we had kids, but even so we wouldn’t usually go out late on a night before a work day. We got to our seats way up in who knows which balcony, and the performer came out on stage and said, “Welcome to Beth Carnegie!” And for the next couple of hours Debbie Friedman turned Carnegie Hall into a shul, into camp, into a Jewish revival. Debbie, zichronah liv’racha, is the composer and singer who gave us Misheberach, L'chi Lach, the ya-la-la-la-s of Havdalah, I Am a Latke – just for some examples. This coming week we will remember Debbie’s 10th yahrzeit.

At Beth Carnegie in 1996 Debbie had on stage her sign language interpreter EJ Cohen, who lives in New Hampshire and who I met years later up here. Were any of you there by chance? After it was over, Laurie and I went to the backstage door. The snow was already really coming down but we wanted to say hi to Debbie before she left, the way you’d go out to try to get an autograph from a Broadway star.

We wanted to talk to her because the Savetts have a connection to Debbie Friedman’s family that may be unique, as surely we are the only two Jewish families who have settled in both Utica, New York and St. Paul, Minnesota. Debbie was an alum of my alma mater, Highland Park Senior High School in St. Paul -- Debbie and Jack Morris, major league pitcher (they would have just missed each other there).

Growing up, Debbie was involved in the youth program at Mt. Zion, the large Reform congregation in St. Paul whose legacy includes Rabbi Gunther Plaut, editor of the Reform movement chumash. In the mid-1960s Mt. Zion started encouraging kids to go to Jewish summer camp at Olin Sang Ruby in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, and before twelfth grade Debbie went back to New York State in the summer to the NFTY Song and Dance Leaders Institute at Kutz Camp. The next year, right out of high school, Debbie was in Israel on Kibbutz; she was leading music for Mt. Zion’s youth group and religious school; she was regional and national songleader for NFTY; and she was back at Kutz on the staff of the Song Leader Institute.

Cantor Jeff Klepper, composer of our Shalom Rav melody, met Debbie that summer of ’69. He was 15 and remembers a charismatic musician, age 19 and about the same size as her 12-string Martin guitar. He says that Debbie was already a celebrity at camp that summer and the best song leader on the staff, the most effective teacher.

This was the time in her life when Debbie was beginning to compose. She didn’t formally study music; she never learned to read music, but she was a sponge for all kinds of songs, particularly folk music both American and Israeli. You can hear Peter, Paul and Mary in a lot of Debbie’s early music, and later Peter Yarrow himself got to know her and said that Debbie was like Mary.

The Savetts always got Debbie’s early vinyl hot off the press, and her records became part of our Friday night ritual at home. We would eat our Shabbat dinner, and sing out the songbooks we pilfered from Herzl Camp, where Dad was the doctor for a week during the summer and we’d get to eat with camp and absorb songs and ruach. I was just in elementary school when these traditions began. After dinner we’d go into the den and put on a Debbie album. The first one, Sing Unto God, was basically a whole Friday night service. She recorded it with the high school chorus from our alma mater as her backup singers. They helped her debut the songs in a presentation at Mt. Zion. That album contained among pieces her quickly-famous Sh’ma.

I don’t remember really meeting Debbie as a young kid that much. She was more than 15 years older than me and I knew she was a big deal. I remember stopping by the Friedman home from time to time with my parents, and seeing her parents Frieda and Gabe and her sister Cheryl. When I would go to camp and we would sing Debbie's first Mi Chamocha or Im Tirtzu, I always felt a little less homesick.

Debbie did something within her first few years of creating that no one else had done before. She bridged camp and Temple. She made the same music the music of both. She wasn’t the first to set traditional Jewish words in a pop or folk style. This was just a few years after Tom Lehrer had already made fun of the 1960s attempts to make worship hip and young in his song “The Vatican Rag.”

But Debbie was the first to make that music work on the bimah. I remember going to Mt. Zion from time to time and hearing there the melodies I knew from our living room, and the music worked even in a Sanctuary that was cavernous, with the very formal cantor and the robes and the bimah up high and the organ. I’m sure being a home-town talent made a difference, but it wasn’t just in Minnesota that her music was catching on. And remember that Debbie started doing this as a woman at a time when the Hebrew Union College had still not ordained a female rabbi or cantor.

I think there are a few reasons Debbie was the one to pave the way of synthesis between camp and Temple, between stand-alone creativity and conventional prayer services. First of all, Debbie was like Mozart. She was a young prodigy, so soulful and so creative but in a tight frame that people could come to recognize and assimilate, that stretched them just the right amount. There’s something familiar across her many generative years. You can hear certain kinds of intervals over and over -- Oseh Shalom, the tears may fall but we’ll hear them call,v’im lo achshav, and the women dancing with their timbrels. Or the same thing in a slightly different mode -- While we’re here in Hebrew School, samekh ayin pay fay…. Oseh shalom – hear it? Those are bits of different kinds of songs from over a twenty year span, but there’s something threading through. She had a few patterns like that she reworked over and over. Each new Debbie album was like getting together with an old friend to catch up and then settling in to hear about her latest adventure in some new part of the world.

You don’t hear anything quite like Debbie’s signature vocal motifs in anyone else’s music, but still anyone can sing or lead a Debbie song. She doesn’t make you go up high to notes you can’t reach, or throw in a bridge that only one person in the group can do. Debbie had plenty of range in her voice, but she mostly sang to us in our range. And when she herself was in front of a group Debbie never did what a James Taylor or a Peter Yarrow does from time to time, vary up a familiar song to make this performance different from another. It was different because the moment was different and she was in the moment with your particular group. Maybe this time she’d sing faster or slower, maybe change the instrumentation, but she never made herself superior to you when she was singing to you or leading you. Not in a concert at a synagogue, or at a Reform movement convention or at CAJE, and not even at Carnegie Hall. Debbie’s songs and their experience were something she was giving to you, so they would belong to you. Her music sounds great if a great cantor sings it, if a choir sings it -- if you sing it.

Debbie packed a lot of Hebrew words into her music. This is the opposite of the niggun approach of repeating a few words, and it was a bit of a counterculture to the art of English in the New Union Prayerbook. She figured out how to make you want to know the Hebrew rather than be scared off by it. Her music was the spoonful of sugar; not sugary (or very occasionally) but more like honey with fragrances that get around the barriers your conscious brain might put up. She did plenty in English too, liturgical and educational – but she came to want to study the original texts and she would return again and again to certain words, like the Song of Songs or Mi Chamocha.

Debbie didn’t create new theological language, but she translated the new metaphors others were teaching and brilliantly made them hearable. While we rabbis began struggling with how to say “God of our forefathers and our foremothers” or “God of our ancestors”, Debbie came up with “Who blessed the ones before us.” She started out using the language of the traditional Reform prayerbook in all its gender-not-neutral formal English – “And Thou shalt love the Lord Thy God with all thy heart” – and eventually she went back and revised some of her own early songs in English. Her Renewal of Spirit album of healing prayers included many that address God very directly and traditionally as “You.” Don’t hide your face from me, I’m asking for your help. Instead of theology, just the real moment of prayer.

Debbie never made herself a celebrity or even a personality outside of her music. In public she taught and narrated through her concerts, and she loved the teaching process up close with musicians and students and in big groups, but she didn’t ask you to listen to a story of her personal experience as the price of connecting. I think it was only much later in her life that people outside her circle knew of the physical ailments she was struggling with. Laurie and I heard her in Atlanta about ten years after Carnegie Hall, in a synagogue just a few years before she died, and it was obvious she wasn’t herself but she didn’t talk about that. Debbie helped give voice to Jewish feminism and some of the spiritual revival from the 1990s onward, but she wasn’t an activist outside of the music itself. The most activist thing was the women’s Seder that her music has become so central to.

For the Jews of North America, Debbie Friedman stands where only Naomi Shemer, Reb Shlomo Carlebach, and Ehud Manor stand.

For me the most important Debbie music is from her third album called Ani Ma’amin, put out in 1976. She created it as she was working with a group just out of high school at Camp Olin Sang Ruby, and the cover has a picture of Debbie sitting on rocks by a lake looking out. The Savett home probably listened to this one the most of all on Shabbat evenings through my junior and senior high years.

Debbie wrote on the jacket about the meaning of “I believe in the coming of the Messiah”, the gaps between dreams and visions and reality, but the music sounds like all the dreams are real and the visions have come to pass. We all mostly know Ani Ma’amin as a somber Shoah melody, but Debbie’s was the first melody I ever knew for this, and it’s entirely different.

That album’s interpretation of Shabbat is that the rest we need isn’t an escape, a break from a world too broken, but a transport to a world where everything true is just real, without effort. That’s what the album sounds like. A world where God’s Torah and love are just there on any given day and it’s no question they will always be – V’ahavatcha al tasir mimenu l’olamim, Baruch Atah Adonai, Ohev Amo Yisrael. And Your love will never move from us, not ever – Blessed are You, Adonai, Who loves Your people Israel.

As we mark ten years without Debbie Friedman’s live voice, may we take to heart what she gave us to say every week: Help us find the courage to make our lives a blessing. Debbie’s voice in our minds and on our recordings, and our voices singing what Debbie gave us -- may they always be a blessing.

Let's Hear It For Article 1!

As our focus is on the inauguration, I don’t want to lose sight of our representatives in Congress. Americans in our spirit of action are drawn to the president, as we are seem to value people who act more than those who deliberate. But I’ve found myself the past few years becoming more and more an Article 1 guy. For me the Capitol is sacred space more than the White House.

In part this is because I’ve met my own U.S. Senators and Representatives, and I’ve been in their office suites and the Capitol itself. I’ve never been at the White House or met a president. And despite the presence of plenty of people in the state and national legislatures whom I don’t admire, and others I don’t agree with – I’m still very Mr.-Smith-y about Congress. Our many elected representatives from all over are what makes this a republic, at least as much as our single elected president.

Part of what the Capitol mob attacked was the dignity of our Senators and Representatives. I worry that the images of invaders in the chambers, sitting in the chair’s seat, make the members seem small and powerless. As I said, American prize action and the very incomplete idea of leadership as the person out in front, and we love or hate those people but we pay attention and assume their power. Appreciating those who deliberate in groups, who decide what others will execute, who oversee and keep watch on them – that’s an acquired democratic taste.

We should acquire that taste.

There’s a reason Article 1 comes before Article 2 in our Constitution. There should be an aura to being an elected official, even as they should be people of the people. Just as our attention is naturally drawn to the president, we should train ourselves to pay attention to our representatives as well.

I have been fortunate in my years in New Hampshire to be represented in both the Senate and the House by members in both parties who have been people of substance. Those I voted for and those I didn’t. I’ve been in offices of Democrats and Republicans, talking both domestic and foreign policy, sometimes with the member and sometimes with staff. At least one member sat in my office as a candidate, and others have been in the our synagogue as candidates and sitting Senators and U.S. Representatives. I have lobbied them, agreed with them, argued with them.

I admire them and their roles more because I don’t think I could ever be a legislator myself. Even though I love to discuss and deliberate. Maybe at the city of school board level, but I couldn’t imagine myself as a legislator beyond that in any capital. It could be that in my role as a rabbi I’ve come to love having authority mixed in with policy deliberation. In any case, those who know how to be good legislators have a special set of virtues and skills – for research and thinking, for listening and motivating and collaborating, for passing their work on to others. These are so important, and not a little countercultural.

So let’s hear it for Article 1, and thank you to those who are serving as our democratically elected representatives. We celebrate you, as the new president comes in front of your house and ours to take his oath tomorrow.